Behind-The-Scenes In The Murder of A University Lacrosse Star — Part I

By Amber Hunt

Yeardley Love was no shrinking violet.

The truth will come out about the University of Virginia lacrosse star, the young woman whose piercing blue eyes peered out to millions from magazine covers, newspaper pages and television reports. We will all learn that though her name has become synonymous with domestic and dating violence—due in no small part to the allegation that her lacrosse-playing boyfriend beat her to death in a violent rage just weeks before they were to graduate—the connection is simply a mistake. Yeardley could not have been the victim of dating violence. She was too strong and too smart for that.

Or so I was told.

It was last July (2011) when I started to tackle the legwork on what would be my second true crime book for St. Martin’s Press. My first, Dead But Not Forgotten, had been a case physically closer to home, one that I had covered and whose parties felt like I’d been fair in the stories I had written about the case for the Detroit Free Press, where I worked as a crime reporter for nearly eight years.

I’d suggested the Yeardley Love case as a follow-up project, even though it was nowhere near home and I’d undoubtedly have a harder time developing sources because I was an unfamiliar face new to the East Coast terrain. But I was drawn to Love’s story.

Here was a young woman with her whole life ahead of her, a beautiful woman who by all accounts had done absolutely nothing to warrant the torrent of rage police said her ex-boyfriend unleashed on her in the early-morning hours of May 3, 2010. I didn’t allow myself to decide if George Huguely V, the privileged and handsome young man accused in the death, was guilty of the first-degree murder charge he faced. A jury today did decide: He was convicted of second-degree murder and could spend up to 40 years behind bars.

Despite my initial withholding of judgment, I was certain of one thing: There had to be a lesson to learn from Yeardley’s death, and I wanted to figure out what that lesson might be.

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